Philosophical Exercises

Summary: I am taking my time to experiment with the sense of sky in modern postural yoga. Halfway through this experiment, I can say that several other philosophical exercises contributed to enriching my felt-worldview with a sense of open sky above me, and so they helped make the yoga exercise (which I find pretty challenging) easier. A little while ago, over the span of a month, I experimented with  modern postural yoga,   in order to feel the insights it can deliver.   The result of that experiment was that I felt only half of what I was trying to feel. Indeed, these insights can be split into two categories: the “sense of earth” and the “sense of sky”, and I only accessed the first. The sense of earth means feeling grounded, bound by gravity, secure. I managed to feel that one and it was quite nice. On the other hand, the sense of sky is whatever feeling of openness comes to challenge/complete this sense of earth. I think of it this way: if you feel secure enou...

In March 2025, I practiced a wonderful philosophical exercise called the “View from Above”. It consists in using reason and imagination to picture human affairs as seen from a great height, such as, for instance, picturing the Earth and its inhabitants from the point of view of the Moon. As Pierre Hadot says, it is an “extraordinarily rich tradition” 1 and you can only hope to touch on a “few aspects” of it in a brief text, such as this blog post. His study “The View from Above” 2 is an excellent primer on this topic. I cannot hope to do the topic as much justice as he did, but I am very excited to tell you a bit about this, to hopefully kindle your curiosity. How to practice the View from Above: From time to time, take a moment to consider something you are familiar with from a different point of view: a bird’s-eye view. For example, think about the places you frequent as they would be seen from the sky, or the region you live in as it would be seen from the Moon. From this...

In February 2025, I devoted my spiritual life to an experiment that was long overdue: reading the Ethics of Spinoza without skipping its very dry & demanding demonstrations. I call it overdue because, for years, I have tried to internalize Spinoza’s philosophy, and finally, my experiment of March 2024 with “spinozist mindfulness” forced me to confront the fact that this could not be done fully without actually taking the plunge into spinozist logic. This new experiment gave me a new fervent appreciation of the paradigmatic spinozist philosophical exercise: reasoning in geometrical order. Last time I talked about practising Spinoza’s philosophy on this blog, I was trying to figure out what the paradigmatic spinozist philosophical exercise would be, and if it could be a form of mindfulness meditation . This reflection culminated in the following conclusion/confession: the “geometrical order” that Spinoza claims as a method, and which consists ...